Tehran, Iran – Iran’s national football team has once again failed to realise the dream of reaching the knockout phase of the World Cup, with the wartime 2026 tournament stirring up a wide range of emotions among Iranians inside and outside the country for different reasons.
Team Melli ended its seventh appearance in the tournament after a 1-1 draw in Seattle on Friday against Egypt left them in third place in Group G, with only three points gleaned from three draws.
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The team was eliminated a day later, after a series of other match results left them just outside of the tournament’s eight third-placed teams advancing to the next stage after FIFA expanded from 32 to 48 teams.
“This was very unlikely to happen, I couldn’t believe how we got out again, with just one spot away from advancing,” Milad, a resident of Tehran who watched all matches impacting Iran’s run at the World Cup, told Al Jazeera.
The circumstances were so peculiar that, among other things, they left the head coach pondering divine intervention, and state television accusing other teams of cheating and collusion.
During the Egypt match, centre-back Shoja Khalilzadeh appeared to score a 93rd-minute winner that would have automatically sent Iran into the Round of 32, but VAR ruled it out after a few centimetres of his right foot were offside.
A member of the coaching staff had his nose broken after another staff member inadvertently headbutted him during emotional group celebrations of the goal before it was overturned.
Khalilzadeh’s goal celebration included posing with sunglasses, so Egypt – which advanced to the knockout phase – later taunted him with an Instagram picture of striker Mohamed Salah giggling while wearing sunglasses.
A disgruntled head coach Amir Ghalenoei told state television during a live post-match interview that he believed everyone enjoyed the match, but at times it seemed like “God was at odds with us” due to the lack of good luck – which also included Iran scoring three VAR-overturned goals during the competition, the highest of any team.
He also blamed tough conditions faced by the players and the entire staff during an unprecedented World Cup campaign, in which the main host country, the United States, has been at war with a participating nation, Iran, for the past four months.
The US military bombed several islands in the Strait of Hormuz in Iran’s southern waters just hours before kick-off in the Iran-Egypt match.
Football federation officials, as well as other staff and media personnel, were denied visas to travel to the US for the tournament, on grounds that included their alleged affiliation with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the force running war and politics in Iran.
The playing squad was only allowed in under unusually tight restrictions, and had to be mostly based in Mexico’s Tijuana instead of the originally designated Tucson in Arizona.
They had to enter the US within 24 hours of a match and leave on the same day, with only a slight easing allowing them to arrive two days early for the Seattle match.
‘Completely mad’
After the Egypt match, Iran needed just one of three things to go their way: Croatia had to lose to Ghana, but it won 2-1; DR Congo had to fail to beat Uzbekistan, but won 3-1; and Algeria vs Austria had to produce a winner, but the match ended 3-3.
Hours before the Algeria-Austria match, Javad Khiabani, a sports presenter infamous for decades of eccentric football commentary, released a video message in Arabic, addressed to the “Muslim brothers in Algeria”. He asked them to defeat Austria and allow Iran, a Muslim-majority country that has suffered war, to advance.
Other hosts of Iranian state television and radio channels broadcasting the match live went through an emotional rollercoaster after Algeria’s Riyad Mahrez scored deep into stoppage time, creating a 3-2 result that would have sent Iran through.
“Now, a Muslim country is doing something to keep another Muslim country in the knockout stage,” shouted another ecstatic commentator, again linking the sport with religion.
He and many Iranians watching at home were devastated moments later when Austria’s Sasa Kalajdzic used his first touch of the game to equalise with a header in the box. The result benefited both teams, because it sent both into the next round, with Austria facing Spain and Algeria facing better odds against Switzerland.
Some inside and outside Iran suggested the game was rigged, but Austria’s head coach Ralf Rangnick responded to match-fixing allegations by saying: “If Alfred Hitchcock had written such a drama, I probably would have said he was completely mad”.
Killings that scarred society
For a second consecutive World Cup, Iran’s national football team did not enjoy unified support from Iranians inside or outside the country, due to the fallout from public protests against the Islamic Republic, the theocratic establishment that has governed Iran since the 1979 Revolution.
In January 2026, thousands of Iranians, including at least 230 children, were killed during nationwide anti-establishment protests that erupted across the vast country of over 90 million. The government, as with previous protests, put all the blame on “terrorists” organised by the US and Israel, but Amnesty International called it an “unprecedented deadly crackdown” by the state that also included a total internet shutdown.
Just months after the killings that scarred parts of Iranian society, some believe football players – who have all avoided commenting on the protests, but in some cases have backed the state – are not representatives of a unified Iran.
Outside the stadiums in the US during the World Cup, some anti-Islamic Republic Iranians protested using Iran’s pre-1979 lion-and-sun flag, as opposed to the official flag which features the word “Allah” in the centre, but most diaspora Iranians ended up cheering for the team in packed stadiums.
Mohammad Khakpour, a former Team Melli captain now based in the US, wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday that the fact Iranians had contrasting emotions after Iran’s elimination from the tournament carries a social message.
“When a part of the society feels that Team Melli is no longer representative of their emotions, pains or hopes, a chasm is created,” he said. “The people may not be happy from a football loss, but they may at times be happy about the collapse of an image that they do not consider to be true”.
Farhad, a 36-year-old resident of eastern Tehran, told Al Jazeera that decades from now, people may remember Team Melli not only as representing the Islamic Republic but also for the football record it left behind.
“Personally, I preferred it if they advanced, but I’m not devastated that they didn’t,” he said.
